


I Am A Man Upon The Land

by scribefindegil



Series: Gravity Cove [1]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe- Selkies, Filbrick is more explicitly abusive in this au than he is in canon, Gen, interspersed with adorable children!, so warnings for child abuse and domestic violence, tragic backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-03 18:13:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6621073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribefindegil/pseuds/scribefindegil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Dipper and Mabel get off the bus in Gravity Cove, they're carrying a sealskin between them, and Stan knows exactly what that means.</p>
<p>Selkie AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

When the twins were small, their mother would tell them stories. “Did you know I used to live in the ocean?” she’d ask, and they’d laugh, “Of course, Ma!”

“Were you a siren?” asked Stan.

“Were you a giant cephalopod?” asked Ford.

“No, babies,” she’d say. “I was . . .” And there she would look up at where their father sat glowering in his chair. “Well. Let’s say I was a mermaid.” And she told them about living under the sea, talking to whales and hiding from fishing boats and marking out days by the turn of the tide.

Later, they’d learn that she was a pathological liar, and that bedtime stories weren’t supposed to be true anyway.

Later still, they’d learn that “mermaid” was the only word she’d lied about.

*

When the children got off the bus, they were carrying a sealskin between them. Each of them held on to one end, and the skin moored them together as they stepped down onto the baking asphalt. They looked around them, the boy suspicious, the girl wide-eyed with delight.

Stan winced. They were so small and so trusting, carrying it around in the open like that. Over the phone, their parents had told him that they treated the skin like a security blanket, handing it off between them, but that when they were in a new place they would both hang on to it, convinced it would keep them together and safe. That was rich. The thing folded up tight under a floorboard in his bedroom was certainly no good at keeping people together. It only kept them broken, and hidden, and lost.

The boy caught him staring and narrowed his eyes. Stan took a deep breath and stepped forwards, putting on his best showman’s smile.

“Hey there, kids! I’m your Grunkle Stan! Welcome to Gravity Cove!”

*

He’d never been far from the ocean. The sound of waves and seagulls and the blue-green-gray tint of the sea suffused the memories of his childhood.

“Wine-dark,” said Ford, when he was eight and reading Homer for the first time. “That’s what he calls it. The wine-dark sea.”

“Your old books are nuts!” said Stan, although he had enjoyed it when Ford told him the parts about the cyclops. “It don’t look anything like wine! And can ya imagine tryin’ ta drink this ocean? Blech!”

Ford laughed as Stan began pointing out all the grossest things he could find along the shore—a dead seagull, stinky fish heads, somebody’s actual underwear (“Ewwww!” Ford squealed, as Stan hooked the offending item with a stick of driftwood and dangled it in front of his brother’s face), piles of smelly, slippery kelp—until the two of them ended up in a seaweed fight, epithets forgotten.

The phrase haunted him, though. Sometimes, when he sat with his mother in her window seat and watched the red sun set over the ocean until it looked endless and otherworldly and almost purple, he understood what the old poet meant. Ma would hold him close and stroke his hair and stare out at the ocean with eyes that looked . . . strange. Almost hungry. Almost sad.

*

The girl—Mabel—beamed at him with a smile that was even bigger than his own, and much more genuine.

“Hi Grunkle Stan!” she yelled, dropping her end of the skin and running over to hug him. If that was her normal volume he was going to have to adjust his hearing aid. He patted her shoulder gingerly; he was a little out of practice with hugs. His niece chattered on. “Did you know that our bus broke and they had to put us on a different one but it was okay because they gave us free pretzels! I made the bag into a friend, wanna see?”

He would have sworn none of her clothes had pockets, but somehow she produced a thing that was, yes, folded out of a travel-sized pretzel bag and had some kind of mouth that opened and closed when she moved her hand.

“Hello, Stan!” she added in a squeaky voice. “It’s so great to be here! Loving all the nature!”

He chuckled. A little basic taxidermy training and she was going to fit right in at the Mystery Shack.

Her brother had gathered up the rest of their luggage and trundled over, the sealskin draped around his neck. He didn’t look like he’d had nearly as much fun with the bus change.

“Hey,” he said, holding out a hand. Not a big hugger, then. Stan shook it.

“Car’s over there,” he said, pointing behind him. “You two knuckleheads wanna go see the ocean?”

Dipper nodded, while Mabel let out a high-pitched scream and flailed her hands inside the sleeves of her sweater. Yeah. He definitely needed to adjust his hearing aid.

*

“Why do we have to go home?” Stan groaned one night, as the two brothers lay on the wormeaten deck of the Stan O’ War and watched the sun sink below the horizon. He gestured at a group of seals that were hauled out on the rocks. “Why can’t we just be like them?”

Ford regarded him critically. “You’d have to grow some more blubber first.”

“Shuddup.” Stan blushed and laid a hand on the soft swell of his belly. “I’ll have you know I’ve got some very impressive muscles under here that could totally kick your butt!”

His brother laughed. “I don’t doubt it.”

Ford laced his fingers together and lay back with his hands behind his head. He looked peaceful out here, more comfortable than he ever did at school, when he kept his hands in his pockets or folded behind his back until he needed them to write or draw. Sometimes he would be relaxed at home, when he was in their shared bedroom or their father was downstairs. Stan knew their dad was just trying to toughen them up, and sure, he could take it, but sometimes he did wish that Dad was gentler with Ford. He’d called him a freak more times than all the jerks at school combined, and unlike with the jerks at school Stan couldn’t exactly fight back.

“Not everything about being on land is bad,” said Ford. “There’s books. Science labs. Pyrotechnics. You can fight things; not much to punch in the ocean.”

“Eh,” said Stan. “I guess.”

As the sun vanished and they began the walk back up the beach, Stan thought again about when they were older, when they’d be able to stay out at sea, adventuring together. Maybe then Ford wouldn’t have to hide his hands. Maybe then the strange longing that grew in his chest every time he left the water’s edge would finally ebb away.

*

The children stared.

It would take a while to get home, so he’d pulled over at one of the little lookout ledges along the road and ushered them outside with a flourish of his cane. He knew they’d been able to make out the ocean from the bus, but this was the first time they’d seen it without glass and the thrum of an engine in the way, been close enough to hear the crash of the waves and the cry of the gulls, smell the salt and the musky seaweed.

He didn’t really blame the twins’ parents for moving inland. They were normal folks who wanted a normal family, and there was no way they would have been able to hide what their children were if they’d let them anywhere near the ocean.

Mabel was giggling wildly and punching her brother’s shoulder as the wind whipped her hair across her face, and Dipper stood stock-still, staring out at the islands in the distance.

“It’s so big,” he breathed.

“I know I know I know!” Mabel squeaked in response. “I’ve never seen so much water in my life! And it’s so sparkly and sploosh! I could just swim away and hide in it forever!”

She turned to him, eyes as wide and sparkling as the sun-flecked sea. “Grunkle Stan, is it always this beautiful?”

Stan thought about storms so wild that the salt spray clouded over the Shack’s windows and the portal room echoed with the snarling crash of the waves, about flat calm winter evenings when the sky blended perfectly into the sea, about how the water looked from below, clear and dappled and welcoming around him.

“Yeah, kid,” he said gruffly. “It is.”

*

It had been an accident, an ironic mistake, just like everything else about his life. But he knew he wouldn’t take this one back, even if he could. Sure, it had destroyed his family, left him to fend for himself on the street with only his car and a crumpled five-dollar bill to his name, but thinking about the alternative felt worse somehow.

He’d just found out that Ford wanted to leave him behind. It wasn’t how his brother saw it, but Stan knew, from the gleam in Ford’s eyes that he’d only ever seen before when they were talking about the sea, that if Ford got into this college he would go away and never come back and Stan wouldn’t be with him. He didn’t know how to talk about it. He was confused and scared and angry and just barely seventeen.

So he punched a wall.

Fine, okay, not the smartest thing to do, but all he should have ended up with was a dent to repair and bloody knuckles. Instead, his fist smashed straight through the plaster and into the open space behind it. He slumped against the wall, cursing under his breath, and as he went to draw his hand back his fingers brushed something that rustled. For all he knew, that was normal for the inside of walls, but nonetheless he grabbed at the thing and pulled.

It yielded, and Stan was left standing there with a heavy package in his hands, wrapped in the same cheap newsprint that his father used in the pawn shop. When he tried to unwrap it, the paper cracked and crumbled along its folds, falling away to the dusty floor.

He was holding some kind of animal skin, gray-brown and dappled and sleek. On what must have once been the crown of its head, the light gray skin was marked with a large dark spot in the shape of a crystal ball. It didn't look like much. Pretty, but not 'hang on to at the cost of damaging your home' pretty. He knew that not everything that circulated through the pawnshop was exactly legal, but he couldn't imagine how illegal this must be for someone to seal it inside the wall for who knew how long. Maybe some kind of rare species? The last of something? The longer he looked the more he felt drawn to it. Even against the musty smell of their house and the plaster dust that clogged his nose, it smelled of salt. Salt and seaweed and freedom.

"Whoever made that racket had better have a damn good reason!"

Stan jumped at the sound of his mother's voice, spinning around to try to block the hole in the wall with his body. He thrust his hands and the skin behind his back.

"Lost me the third caller in a row! There I am slaving away without a word of thanks from any of you or from those lousy clients—"

She stopped. Stopped speaking. Stopped moving. Just—stopped. Her face was frozen, her legs paused mid-stride. The bangles on her wrists jingled and swayed from perfectly still arms. Stan wasn't sure if she was even breathing.

He was prepared for the biggest chewing-out of his life, but instead she said, quietly, with a sort of hungry urgency that he'd never heard before, "Where did you find that?"

Stan laughed nervously, suddenly aware that the skin had unfurled in his hands and she must be able to see it. He waved one hand nonchalantly in front of him. "Ah, it's nothing! Nothing to worry about. I'll fix it—"

His mother's hand snaked out and closed around his wrist, as suddenly and fiercely as the sea dashing a ship onto the rocks.

"I don't care about the wall. Let me see it."

He held the skin out in front of him, and Ma Pines snatched it out of her son's hands so quickly that her long manicured nails raked Stan's skin. She didn't seem to notice, just clutched the thing to her chest and stared.

"What is it?" asked Stan. “Ma? Why is it so important?”

She jumped as if she’d forgotten that he was there, which was absurd. Ma could smell illicit booze through three doors and overhear an incriminating conversation two blocks away. She never missed anything.

Then she smirked and her shoulders eased back to their normal slouch and the moment was past. Maybe he’d imagined it.

“Just something I need to talk to your father about,” she said, with a tone that implied that Stan was going to spend another night pretending he couldn’t hear his parents screaming at each other. “But not right now. I have to go out. Where’s your brother?”

“School. Working on his dumb project.”

Ma nodded, calculating. “I won’t be gone long. Don’t tell your father anything until I’m back, and patch that up this instant!”

As Stan got out the plaster, his mother folded the strange skin and packed it into her largest purse. She was humming. Stan recognized the tune, some old song she used to sing them as a lullaby, but he couldn’t remember the words. Then she took a knife and slit open the cushion of her window seat, pulling out what looked like another skin, this one much smaller. Stan was sure she wouldn’t tell him anything about it if he asked, but he did wonder how many more secrets were folded into the bones and furnishings of the house.

Ma turned to go and then, to Stan’s complete surprise, she whirled around and kissed him on the forehead.

“My little free spirit,” she said, her eyes glistening. “I love you, baby.”

“Ma,” he complained with a grimace, because she didn’t get sappy like this, not without some kind of bite behind it. “I’m seventeen!”

She took his face in her hands, her thumb stroking his cheek. “You’ll always be my baby,” she said, and then her hands dropped away and she turned to go.

That was the last time he ever saw her.

*

Mabel pointed with one arm and rhythmically prodded her brother with the elbow of the other. “Dipper, look, it’s a bird! Why yes, you are very good at screaming!”

“Hmm . . .” Dipper peered out towards the water, resolutely ignoring Mabel’s pokes. “I think it’s a kittiwake. Dad got me a couple field guides before we left.”

“Heh,” said Mabel, “I didn’t know your nerd books had such great names. Kittiwake. That sounds like a magic cat that lives in the ocean! Maybe we’ll see some!”

Stan zoned out as Dipper began to protest. Well, she was close. He had seen some very unhappy-looking mercat things around that would grant you small and very literal wishes if you gave them fish. Which reminded him, he needed to keep the kids close and safe and away from as much of this crazy town’s weirdness as possible. Some of it was inevitable. Heck, some of it was why they were here in the first place. But one dangerous magical artifact was more than enough for them to deal with. They’d draped the sealskin across the back seat of the car, the tail over Mabel’s side and the nose over Dipper’s. He wondered if they’d be this good at sharing it once they knew . . .

He realized that both kids had fallen silent and were staring at him expectantly.

“Huh?”

“I said, do you know what kind of seagull it is, Grunkle Stan?”

Stan scoffed, taking a sidelong glance at the bird that had wheeled in front of them before veering off with a shriek.

“Beats me, kid. A gull’s a gull far as I’m concerned.”

*

No. Not the last time. Not really.

“Dad! What are you doing? Dad, stop!”

Stan’s cries were cut off as his father wheeled around, backhanding him across the face. He stumbled onto the sand, his head ringing. Somehow, the words to the song his mother had been humming earlier rushed into his head.

_And thou shalt marry a gunner good . . ._

He’d taken worse blows than this in the ring and on the playground, much worse, but he’d known what was happening then. His reaction was automatic. Dodge if you could, catch your breath, strike back before they thought you’d recovered. He couldn’t do that here. He couldn’t—

“How dare you talk back to me, you ungrateful little maggot?” Filbrick roared. “Look at what you’ve done!”

Stan didn’t know what was happening. He’d still been trying to patch the hole he’d made when his father came home, slamming doors behind him, and there were shouts and he was slammed back against the wall, the fresh plaster cracking under the impact, and then he’d been thrown to the floor as footsteps echoed through the house, and then he was running down to the shore after his father, trying not to think about the gun Filbrick held in his hand.

_And a right fine gunner I’m sure he’ll be . . ._

Stan watched, dazedly, as his father raised the rifle to his shoulder. “I won’t let that lying bitch take what’s mine!” Filbrick glanced down at where Stan was sprawled at his feet before he took aim. “Pathetic. I thought if I raised you right you wouldn’t take after her, but you’ve always been freaks. You got the brains of a seal and your brother,” Filbrick sighted down the barrel of the gun, “got the looks.”

_And the very first shot that ever he shoots . . ._

Stan shook his head, and as his vision cleared, he could see what his father was aiming at. Out at the end of the dock were two seals, a full-grown one and a juvenile. The larger seal had a dark mark on its head, a circle with an extension on one side that made it look like a crystal ball.

His eyes widened.

_Will kill both my young son and me._

This was crazy. There was no way—people didn’t just turn into seals. This wasn’t a bedtime story. It was his life. His life, and his father had beaten him down and was raising a gun against—he didn’t know what. He didn’t know what was going on or what was true or who or what he could trust.

So he focused on the one thing he did know. Ever since he could remember, Stan had done anything he could to protect his family.

He charged, and Filbrick fell, and the shot went wide.

By the time he looked back, the seals were gone.

***

“Ocean ocean ocean ocean ocean!” Mabel chanted as they climbed back in the car. She pressed both hands against the windows, staring out as the water flickered in and out of view beyond the pine trees. “This is gonna be the best summer ever! We’re gonna find shells, and explore tidepools, and go swimming, and discover unlikely friendships and passionate romance!” She wiggled her eyebrows and kissed the car window with a squelch. “I can’t wait!”

Stan tried to meet Dipper’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “She, uh, always like this?”

The boy nodded. “Pretty much. You get used to it.”

But he wasn’t really paying attention. Although he wasn’t chanting about it, he also stared out hungrily at the glimpses of the ocean. And to think the kids had just an eighth of the sea-folk’s blood in them. Physically it was hard to tell. The Pines’ had been dark-haired and dark-eyed long before Stan’s mother entered the picture. But this love for the sea, never mind the skin itself . . . their heritage had come out strong.

Stan was supposed to keep them for the summer, teach them what they needed to know, and then put them on a bus back to the inland. Watching their faces as the car turned the corner and rolled out into a clear patch, with only a rail blocking their view of the sea, Stan wasn’t sure if they’d let him send them back. Once someone like them found their way to the sea, they would fight tooth and nail (and fin and flipper) to keep from returning.

***

Stan lay on the sand, his lip split and his knuckles bloody, with his father towering over him. He wondered dazedly whether Filbrick would turn the gun on him now that Stan had robbed him of his first choice of target.

Instead, he growled, “You’re no son of mine. You side with those monsters in the sea, you can stay with ‘em! Don’t let me catch you around my house again.”

He turned and stomped away, and Stan didn’t try to respond or follow. His head was swimming. He rolled over until he could see the water and stared, looking for some kind of sign, or failing that, the kind of peace that he usually felt around the ocean. He got nothing. Nothing until the tide began to go down and the waves washed a red dress and a mustard-yellow shirt up onto the shore.

He slept on the beach in the lee of their unfinished sailboat with the damp yellow shirt as a pillow. Listening to the waves made him feel a little less empty. The first night he awoke, or thought he awoke, to see a young seal watching him from the shallows. He tried to count the nails on its flippers, but it was too dark and far away.

He reached out a tentative hand.

“Ford?”

But the seal turned and vanished into the water.


	2. Chapter 2

Sometimes he thought he was going mad. Sometimes other people did too, and he had to sit in terrifyingly sterile rooms and describe splotches of ink, and he began to wonder what it said about him that he’d immediately thought that the marking on the old sealskin was a crystal ball.

He lied to everyone about what happened so that they’d believe him. The paper printed an obituary that said his mother had drowned, but he always just said that she’d left. Taken his twin brother and run.

“Why didn’t she take you, too?” one of the doctors asked.

“She couldn’t,” said Stan, and refused to elaborate.

He’d only tried to tell the truth, or what he thought was the truth, once, on a night when he was angry and drunk and probably a few other things besides.

“Dude, what are you on?” laughed Jimmy, and Stan laughed too, laughed until he cried. He was so glad when Jimmy kissed him and he could just stop talking, stop thinking, maybe stop hurting so much at least for a little while. If Jimmy remembered what Stan had said the next morning, he didn’t mention it.

At first he took jobs along the shore—packing fish, unpacking cargo. But he found that he couldn’t look at the sea without his chest aching, like there was a tide rising inside his body that was going to split him open. And he knew now that there was no healing it, that he was longing for a thing he’d never be able to have.

Stan turned inland.

*

He rolled down the windows as he drove, let the salt wind whip through the car. Mabel giggled as it blew her hair across her face and Dipper grimly pressed down on the brim of his cap. Both of them clutched at the sealskin with one hand, anchoring it between them.

“I feel like I’m on a boat!” said Mabel, eyes wide and rapt, with her face towards the sea and the wind in her hair.

“Heh,” said Stan. “You’ve never been on one for real, have you?”

She shook her head.

“Well, first time for everything. Believe me, this is nothing like it.”

Mabel grinned. “Is it better?”

Stan grinned back at her in the rearview mirror. “Kid, you have no idea. Imagine, nothing but ocean as far as you can see, waves under you, spray on your face . . . You better do something about that hair, though. If you blind yourself with it and fall over the side, don’t think I’m gonna catch you!”

“You won’t need to!” said Mabel, tugging at the sealskin with a smile.

After a few moments, she added, “Grunkle Stan?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Is being a seal better than being on a boat?”

There was a long pause before he answered, a long breath as he tried to ignore the ache in his chest.

“You have no idea.”

*

The postcard had been a surprise. Stan had almost convinced himself that he’d never hear from his brother again. And then out of nowhere he was holding a postcard with a picture of some place called Gravity Cove on one side and a simple, scrawled message on the other. “Please come.”

So Stan came.

He hadn’t been expecting Ford to have a real house. He certainly hadn’t been expecting the harpoon gun that was pointed at his face as soon as he opened the door. He couldn’t begin to express how little he had been expecting . . . well . . . whatever this was.

A monstrous underground cavern stretched out before him. Whether it had been carved by the waves or by human hands (or, he supposed, inhuman ones) it must have taken ages. The whole house upstairs could easily fit inside it with room to spare, and that was just the part above the waterline. He didn’t know how deep the cave went but he could hear the crash as the waves beat against the hidden entrance.

A series of walkways stretched between the elevator Stan had just stepped out of and some kind of control booth mounted into the rock and, towering above him at the far side of the cavern, a vast inverted triangle with a circular opening in the center. So this was the portal that had his brother so concerned. Stan didn’t blame him.

Ford’s hair was wet and he was clutching a sealskin in one hand and his journal in the other. His grip on both of them tightened when Stan took a step towards him. Stan spread his hands out reassuringly and didn’t move any closer. He didn’t want his brother to disappear again, not before he’d sorted things out and found some way to help him.

He realized he hardly knew anything about what his mother had been, what his brother was. Was this . . . normal? The twitchiness, the paranoia? Was this what staying in the ocean instead of around humans did to you? Another thought struck him. Ford had said he didn’t know who he could trust. Had someone tried to take his skin, hide it the way their father had hidden their mother’s? The tempest of emotions inside him solidified into hot, righteous anger at the thought. If anyone had hurt his brother, he’d see that they paid.

*

The road pulled away from the shore for a while, winding past thick stands of trees and abandoned quarries.

“Can we go swimming there?” Mabel asked, as they passed the largest quarry. A few cars were parked beside it and they could see people floating in the water and jumping off the tall rocks.

“Um, sure,” said Stan. “If you want to.” He couldn’t believe once she’d gotten a taste of the sea, of real water, that she’d want to go back to some big granite-lined puddle.

Mabel kept watching the quarry until it passed out of sight. “It looks like a good place to make friends!” she said.

Stan snorted. “Sure. If you like people who are too ugly and nosy for their own good. That’s all this town’s got, kid. Take it from me.”

“Nope!” said Mabel brightly. “I bet they’re delightful!”

Friends. Sure. Stan knew how well that went. Caring too much about other people—about humans—never went well for people like them. There were too many risks. Too much to lose. He could only hope they learned that before it was too late.

*

Of course, in the end, it was him who ruined everything. He’d started the fight—of course Ford was right, of course he couldn’t have come with them, of course his life falling apart was his own fault—and he’d given his brother the push that sent him floating into the hungry blue maw of the portal, and he’d just stood there babbling instead of pulling him back and now—

Ford was gone. And Stan was trapped.

He’d thrown himself at the machine for he didn’t know how long, pulling levers and pressing buttons and finally just beating the thing with his fists, screaming at it to give his brother back. It sat there impassively. Not a spark.

The wound on his shoulder throbbed. He hadn’t eaten much—anything, if he was honest—in his last two days of travel, saving every penny for gas and those damn tolls, and the pangs of hunger in his stomach had faded to a resigned emptiness that was even more worrying. He was shivering. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been down in the cavern, but he was beginning to realize that if he didn’t get out soon he wasn’t going to get out at all.

The elevator, Ford had told him, could only be operated from below. And, as Stan was discovering, that meant that someone needed to stand outside the doors to send it up. He’d tried pushing the button and running, lashing together debris to hit it from a distance, and even working one of the panels loose so he could see the wiring, but none of it worked. The elevator was a bust. As for the ocean entrance, he knew that was designed to keep out intruders who didn’t have Ford’s . . . abilities. There was no way he could make it on one breath with his fragile human lungs.

Still, if it was a choice between staying here and slowly starving to death or at least trying to get out, well, there wasn’t much to it, was there? Besides, he was a gambler. Not a good one, not a lucky one, but thus far still a living one. The universe damn well owed it to him to make good on a set of long odds at least once.

He hadn’t been able to bring himself to touch Ford’s sealskin since the fight. His brother had dropped it when he first lunged for the journal and it lay where it had fallen, crumpled on one of the walkways. He hoped like hell that whatever was on the other side of the portal was more accessible to humans than this place, but he had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be. That he might have doomed his brother in more ways than one.

Stan looked at the skin. He’d never actually touched it. He’d barely seen it; his mother had kept it hidden so well and so long. But it wasn’t like he could leave it. As long as he kept the skin safe, he was keeping at least some part of Ford safe as well.

Stan picked it up and tied the flippers together so it draped over his shoulders like a cape. It was soft and heavy (and he knew he shouldn’t be adding more weight but what else was he supposed to do?) and strangely comforting.

He slipped into the water, breathing out sharply as the cold hit him, and paddled his way over to the entrance. Okay. Deep breath. Here goes nothing.

He dove.

*

“When did your parents tell you?” asked Mabel.

“Hmm?” Stan was focused, uncharacteristically, on the road.

“When did your parents tell you? About being magic? Mom said that twelve is traditional but she also said that getting our chores done early would help focus our seal powers, so I think she might have been making it up.”

Stan chuckled. He could appreciate that type of trickery, however transparent. Hell, he might have to start using it himself. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Seal powers sure can be finicky things. If you want them to work, you gotta listen to everything I say. And take your shifts in the gift shop with no complaining. And only make fun of the tourists during designated non-work times. And, uh, don’t go talking up this whole ‘magic’ thing. That’s definitely bad for the seal powers.”

Dipper made a suspicious-sounding noise.

They drove for a moment in silence, or as close to silence as Mabel was capable of, which meant a constant soft chanting of “Seal powers, seal powers,” as she tried to tickle Dipper with a corner of their sealskin.

“You didn’t answer her question,” said Dipper, but to Stan’s relief he said it at the very moment they turned into the Shack’s driveway and the sea breeze hit them. Both children gasped at the view, questions forgotten, as Stan pulled to a stop.

*

Stan was pretty sure he was going to die.

His lungs ached, crying out for air that he couldn’t reach. His head was pounding. The salt water had been soothing on his shoulder at first, but now it burned. When he opened his eyes everything was black. He couldn’t even tell if he was moving.

He kicked, feebly, with legs he could barely feel. At least this was peaceful. A lot more peaceful than all the other times he’d stared down death in the last ten years. No weapons. No other people to mourn, or, more likely, to gloat. Just him and the vast, impassive weight of the ocean dragging him down. Even as the pressure in his lungs intensified, he realized the ache that had lodged in his chest for as long as he could remember had abated. Maybe this was what he’d wanted this whole time. Maybe he should just give up and let the tide take him . . .

No! He had to keep going. Had to get Ford back. Had to. He raised one hand to the sealskin around his neck and clasped it tight. Had to keep it safe.

As he pulled, the skin unknotted, and he panicked, reaching up with his other hand to grab the loose flipper as the skin billowed around him.

Then, suddenly, he wasn’t holding anything at all.

Stan turned to look behind him—he must have dropped it somehow, his fingers clumsy from the wet and the cold—even though he knew he couldn’t afford to pause. He spun with what felt like surprising speed. His brain must be starting to misfire from the lack of oxygen. Knowing there’d be nothing but blackness, Stan opened his eyes.

He could see. He could see the granite walls of the passage he was in, the faint light of the chamber and the fainter light of the outside. And floating behind him, a tattered jacket lined with fake fur.

It was so clear that he almost forgot that he was still underwater and opened his mouth to let out some exclamation. His teeth felt weird. Everything felt weird. Not bad, though. Good. Better.

He bent his body into a butterfly kick and shot down the passageway and up into the open water, his head breaking the surface without a splash. He drew in a deep breath and then folded back down, doing his best to look at himself, to confirm what he already knew.

His body was silver-brown, and dappled, and he could see flippers where his feet had been.

It was perfect. He was perfect. The water embraced him as he dove and rolled and swam, cutting through the surf with a body that felt so much more _him_ than the ponderous human one. The ache in his chest was gone and he felt like he could swim forever. Maybe he would.

Stan hauled himself out on the beach, sliding up the rocks on his belly. He stretched, and as easily as it had enveloped him the sealskin fell away. The rocks dug into his stomach, and he was drenched and naked and he should have been miserable, but he felt amazing. Every substance he’d tried in his years on the run paled in comparison. This was the high he had always been chasing, the thing he’d been missing for as long as he could remember.

And it was Ford’s.

The joy in him snuffed out as suddenly as it had come. Ford had had this, and now he’d lost it. He was gone, and if the other side of the portal was anything like this one he might not even be able to make it to the air if he was stuck as a human.

Stan looked up at the house on the shore. He could get to the cavern now. He wouldn’t rest until he got his brother back. He was sure of it.

*

Stan had to admit, the place Ford had chosen to build his house did half the tourist trap work for him already. Tourists were attracted to the sea like magpies to glass, and for once he couldn’t blame them. The view was spectacular: the rocky coastline stretching out in both directions with thick stands of pines behind it and the ocean glittering in the sunlight. On days like this, when it was clear, he could see the islands in the distance and the lighthouse on the point.

He’d been there long enough that he forgot, sometimes, what it must be like not to see this every day. The children were gaping. Even Mabel seemed unable to find words.

“Can we . . .” Dipper stammered after a while. “. . . Today?”

“Well, the Shack is closed up,” said Stan, and the kids hadn’t been around long enough to know how unusual that was. “Don’t trust that kid I’ve got working register to run it without me. Probably bring the whole place to wrack and ruin.”

Dipper and Mabel were barely listening, so he didn’t bother with more excuses. The truth was that he knew better than to keep them from the sea on their first day.

“Is it hard?” said Dipper. “Do we need to do training, or study, or work up to it or something?”

“Nah,” said Mabel, bumping their shoulders together. “We’ll be naturals! But if you’re scared, I’m going first!” She wrapped the skin around her shoulders like a shawl and flung one arm into the air. “Seal powers activate!”

Nothing happened. Stan laughed until she stuck her tongue out at him. “That’s not how it works, kiddo,” he said. “You’ve got to be in the water.”

They turned, all three of them, to stare at the sea.

*

Stan hadn't expected Ford to keep in touch with what was left of their family. He wondered what he could have told them. “Sorry, turned into a seal and ran away, but I’m back now.” Not likely. So he was surprised when Shermy called him up out of the blue, some seventeen years after he’d lost Ford to the portal, and cut him off in the middle of his usual Mr. Mystery spiel.

“I need your help,” he said, without preamble.

“. . . With what?” Stan answered.

There was a rush of static down the phone as Shermy sighed. Stan got the impression that he wasn’t exactly thrilled about this conversation. What could he want? Money? Sure, Ford had managed to build this crazy house but he hadn’t exactly been rolling in it, and it wasn’t like Stan had a lot to spare.

“It’s my son,” said Shermy. He spoke quickly. “Well, his wife. She’s pregnant—twins, and we were all thrilled, but . . . the doctors say there’s something wrong. Some problem with the development in one of them. They may recommend that she terminate. But—and I know you’ll tell me it’s wishful thinking, Stanford, especially after we haven’t talked in so many years, but . . . I think the doctors might be wrong. I think the baby—the one that isn’t growing properly—I think she might be like you.”

_Like you._

The words beat at the back of Stan’s head for the next four months, as constant and inexorable as the waves. He still did his job well; he was very good at ignoring words in his head by this point, but every day as he led tours and hawked merchandise and every night as he worked on the portal and swam out into the harbor with the stars on his skin, some part of him was always thinking it. _Like you._ It was there as he searched for records and made calls to the part of New Jersey he’d thought he was done with forever, as he talked to the daughter of the woman who’d delivered him, who referred him to another midwife who he was promised wouldn’t ask questions. It was there as he shut down the Shack in the height of tourist season and drove inland to a neat suburban house where his brother and his nephew and his nephew’s wife waited, looking equal parts determined and terrified.

_Like you_ , thought Stan later, looking down at the babies in his arms. Well, one baby, wrinkled and ruddy-faced, who had managed to punch him in the nose when he first picked her up, and one tiny white-coated seal pup. He rocked them and sang to them about the sea, though he never sang the song his mother had hummed the day she left.

He stayed there for three days, until the seal baby stretched and yawned and slipped out of its sealskin, and then there were two normal-looking human infants in the crib and a small white pelt in Stan’s hands. He saw the palpable relief on their parents’ faces and knew that he’d probably overstayed his welcome.

“Should we hide it?” asked his nephew, staring at the skin uncertainly.

_Like you_ , thought Stan. He shook his head. “Let her hang on to it. Let them both hang on to it.”

“Both?” said Shermy. “But you—I mean, but Stanley wasn’t . . .”

“Both,” said Stan, looking down at the two sleeping babies.

_Like you._ But maybe they didn’t have to be.

*

“Hey, doods!”

The children jumped, and Stan laughed at their surprise. He hoped the kids couldn’t tell how transparent his laughter was, how tense he was underneath it. He’d told Soos not to bother coming to work today, but he was grateful for the distraction.

“Sorry!” said the handyman, ambling over. “Didn’t mean to startle you dudes. I was just hanging out . . . fixing stuff. It’s kind of my job.”

“Kids,” said Stan, “This is Soos, my handyman. Soos, this is Dipper and Mabel. There. Now you’ve been introduced, so you can get back to work.”

“Waitwaitwaitwaitwait!” yelled Mabel, holding up her hands. “I think you’re all forgetting something! We need a first-day-of-summer picture for my scrapbook!”

She produced a large and distressingly glittery volume, seemingly out of nowhere (and okay, Stan was going to need to make sure she didn’t have some other powers he didn’t know about), and pointed to the first blank page.

“This is a very important moment,” she went on. “At the end of the summer we need to look back on how much we’ve bonded as a family and how many friends we’ve made and how many people have fallen in love with us!” She paused and looked between her uncle and her brother. “Well, with me. And maybe the rest of you if you let me do makeovers!”

“No,” said Dipper, at the exact same time that Stan said, “Not gonna happen ever.”

Undeterred, Mabel produced her phone and pirouetted between Dipper and Stan. “Mr. Soos, will you do the honors?”

Soos obligingly took the phone. Mabel threw an arm around Dipper and adjusted the sealskin so it was draped over both their shoulders. Stan grinned and held out his cane the way he did when tourists asked for photos.

The phone clicked.

“Great!” said Mabel, running over to examine the picture. “Now we can remember this forever!”

*

He didn’t hear anything for years, and he didn’t dare try to reach out. But then, one Saturday evening in April when the Shack was dusted with a late snowfall and the sea faded out into a slate-gray sky, his nephew called.

They hadn’t even named the babies properly when he left. He didn’t really blame them. If you got thrown into some kind of wild fairy tale you had to know that names had power, so giving your children’s to your sinister shape-changing uncle was probably unwise.

“How are the girls?” he asked, and from the silence on the other end of the line he thought something terrible had happened, until his nephew cleared his throat and explained, no, not girls. One girl and one boy. Mabel and Dipper. Stan didn’t ask which one of them had been born with the skin. In some ways, he was happier not knowing.

“Listen,” said the voice on the other end of the phone, “They’ve been asking questions. I think—we think—that maybe they need to know something about what they are. We can tell them the basics, of course, but we were wondering if maybe you could take them for the summer. Just teach them what they need to know. It'll just be a bigger shock if we put it off.”

Stan agreed immediately, but at first he wasn’t sure why they’d even extended the offer. It was clear that the twins’ parents wanted nothing to do with the more supernatural aspects of their family history. But when he replayed the conversation over in his head, he remembered the note of fear in his nephew’s voice. At the time he’d thought the man was afraid of him, but that wasn’t quite right, was it? He was afraid that if his children found out too late, felt too betrayed, that they would leave. The way Ford had. The way his family thought he had.

“Don’t worry,” he told the phone, now resting silently on its receiver. “They won’t end up like me.”

*

The children paused at the path that led to the beach and looked at Stan as if for some sort of confirmation, turning their heads in perfect unison. They were so young. So innocent. He wanted to tell them that he’d changed his mind, that they shouldn’t stay here after all. He wanted to tell them no, don’t use this thing, it will only break your heart. He wanted to pluck the sealskin from their fingers and hide it away where it would be safe.

Instead, he put on his best showman’s smile. “Well, go on,” he said. “The beach is right there. What are you waiting for, a kiss on the cheek?”

Stan watched as the children scampered on ahead of him, running eagerly for the ocean, their hands joined by the shining sealskin that streamed out behind them and billowed like a sail in the wind

 


End file.
